We recently connected with Caroline Horste and have shared our conversation below.
Caroline, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.
I started my business back in 2020 as a 1:1 service provider working project management contracts on a freelance basis. I loved the time freedom and flexibility that contract work offered me, and I loved getting to work across industries with project teams that were wildly different from each other.
I had pivoted into project management after a career working in higher education, though, and I knew that something was missing. While higher education hadn’t been for me longterm, I had loved the feeling of getting to use my career in service of others. Certainly there were a lot of things I didn’t love: I didn’t love feeling stuck in a role where no one senior to me had the agency to promote me, I didn’t love being in an industry where being creative wasn’t rewarded, and I didn’t love how fleeting and ephemeral any change was.
After hearing this same narrative over and over while commiserating with friends and former colleagues who had also left the field, my a-ha moment was that the population in desperate need of (and wildly deserving of) service was (drumroll please) none other than the higher ed folks still in the field and who couldn’t see what they might do for a living “on the other side” if they left higher ed.
Enter Caroline Manages, a platform where I teach higher education employees how to infuse project management best practices into their work. Some of the folks who follow me definitely plan to leave their jobs to put their new skills to work (sometimes immediately) as professional project managers; others want to upskill to apply these new talents to their existing roles. Either way, it feels almost like a superpower: by day, I’m a director of operations & strategy at a DEI-focused start-up, and by night, I get to teach the most deserving population ON EARTH (not that I’m biased) how to do what I do. It’s a really, really great gig.
Caroline, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My career background is squiggly. After a BS in geology and mathematics (hello STEM), I earned a Master’s degree in College Student Counseling, at the time pretty convinced that I wanted to work on a college campus serving college students forever.
The parts of that dream that never got old, by the way, were the college students. I really love working with people who are at an inflection point in their lives — people who, one way or another, are going to be somewhere worlds apart from where I met them in only a few short years. After a few years, I started to realize that I was really good at 1) making things happen and 2) making things that were ALREADY happening more efficient. This was really my gateway into project management; I went BACK to school (cue my parents shrieking in the background) to earn an MBA and became a certified Project Management Professional.
I’ve slowly been growing a platform called Caroline Manages where I share my story of growing into project management, as well as provide free and low-cost project management education. I got here because ultimately I believe that the entire world is made out of projects, and that therefore the entire world gets brighter and more beautiful when more people know how to bring projects into being effectively. I also believe that when you make it, you turn around and hold your hand out for the people behind you.
I’m really proud of how much I give using my platform. I get people all the time telling me that I should charge a lot of money. I worked my ass (can I say ass here?) off to earn a good living during my day job, so now I get to charge whatever I want for my side gig and that means that I get to draw a hard line around keeping things affordable, since my clients are job pivoters. (As we move into a recession, this becomes an even clearer heartbeat for me.) I’m proud of being able to stay mission-driven in an industry that can push you, if you’re not careful, to become profit-driven. I’m proud of every “I got the job!!!!” message or DM or email or voice memo I’ve ever gotten. I’m proud of a lot of things!
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
One of the things I harp on (even to casual followers) is that project management is about creating value, and I think I subconsciously internalized that when creating my platform and my content. I try to strike a balance between showing up often (I write a weekly newsletter and I blog regularly) and making sure that every single piece of content passes the “does this actually add value to peoples’ lives” test.
Carl Sandburg said that “time is the coin of our lives”. All of us talk about how thinly our attention spans are stretched and about social media detoxes; if I am going to ask people to spend their frankly precious time and energy on something I’ve created I want it to be great and I want it to be accessible.
By now I think the people that follow me know that about me: I want every single thing I do to go beyond inspiration and into “how can I see myself doing what she does? How can I take something that felt inaccessible to me and make it real?”
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Oh man. Can you add a trigger warning for pregnancy loss at the beginning of this? So, in 2018, I lost a baby to ectopic pregnancy. It was horrible but because I was in higher ed at the time I had the luxury of great benefits and a boss who really couldn’t have been more amazing about helping me handle it. For the next two years I tried to get pregnant, and the longer it didn’t happen, the longer my husband and I sort of passively put the idea on the shelf. “We’re happy, maybe this is just life — just the two of us? This isn’t the life we’d pictured but with time and hard work it can be a life we love anyway.”
Fast forward to December 2020 when I quit my higher ed job with its maternity leave benefits and $40/mo platinum PPO to become a freelance project manager, operating under My Very Own LLC and taking my life into my own hands, and (you know where this is going) LITERALLY three weeks later got pregnant. Of course.
The lesson I had to unlearn here is that there’s a certain order to do things, and also that there’s a way to live your life that’s “safe” for big change and a way that’s not. My baby came (happy and healthy!) in September 2021 and while it was on paper probably the LEAST logical choice from a career perspective… ultimately there was a way for me to fit my career around my life in a way that prioritized the life I wanted.
There’s also an important lesson here around that all important “maternity leave”: if you’re making more money but you don’t get a paid leave, there’s a certain threshold over which it doesn’t matter; you can self-fund your own benefits and still take home more money. Which is kind of back to lesson 1: there’s no one right way to do a life for creatives or business owners. You can do life however you want. The goal is just to make your career fit, not to make it look like your boss’s.
Contact Info:
- Website: carolinemanages.com
- Instagram: @carolinemanages
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/caroline-manages/
- Other: If of interest, here’s a link to my newsletter sign-up: https://carolinemanages.com/newsletter/
Image Credits
Jordan Wilshaw